It's a New World Every Heartbeat

Gulley Jimson and I used to be best friends, even though he is made-up. Wayward human and color appreciator,he is a main character in Joyce Cary's novel trilogy,one of my favorites. Irish Joyce Cary studied to be a painter, served in the British military and civil service in West Africa (where I grew up). William Blake, intoxicating painting, a complete devotion to color and the creative passion, and a disregard for pennies and those without appetites - how could I not acknowledge these roots?

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Watch it and learn. Watch it and remember. Watch it and appreciate change and growth in its many-splendored expressions of humanity, as those who have the courage to march on and invite the rest of us to catch up, add to, build on.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Alex Buisse captures the adventure of climbing and free-flying in ways you will never forget. Take a look at his portfolio.

If there is
a mountain there is a mountaintop. Unless we know there is a mountain, and we
know the plains, we will never know there are peaks and valleys. Without this
knowledge the oceans are invisible and beyond the depth of our perception.

We can never
know there is a destination unless we truly know there is a beginning, and a journey,
and there is a home. This perception applies everywhere – meals are not real to
us unless our perception is satisfied of being full, in some way, satisfied.

My Dad used
to say, early in any meal (except breakfast) – what’s for dessert? My mother
would wince, predicting, and sometimes throw back to him, What did you have in
mind? With a hint of not just sarcasm but just a hint of pepper and spice,
easily detectable and yet easy to pass over if you knew her and knew him, as he
easily passed over it with some charm or other and she served the dessert she’d
already planned, in her own time.

Saturday, October 04, 2014

Roots, bones and seeds -
What wild seeds are sown
In the minds of men, giants of the earth
Who don’t know their provenance, their origins
Except that they are created.

Much more time and we learned that we began as eggs,
as heat-seeking microscopic missiles calling to one other and joining forces.
The shadows stretch with them,
Reaching long into forests and sometimes deep into
Canyons, ravines, sometimes the depths of oceans,
Until their gnarled fingers and feet begin to slow down,
To notice the smooth swirls of tree bark worn by centuries
Of wind, all manner of weather and time; until the roar of
Unknown
ocean deep also opens into the golden illumination
Of long spears of light reaching through time from the sun
And showing particles dancing like raindrops in air, like sparklers
At night, like dust in the wind when it carries dust more gently
But visibly, moving air tangibly to make new layers, new forms
Until it is built upon or wiped away, clean.

Wake up today and hear the power of their roar,
The seeds come to bloom and letting out sound
Along with flower. Each culture grows and shows its
Provenance, its struggle, its power and bloom in old and new ways,
A voice perhaps like a tower of sound, a boom of ocean change,
A pound of thunder sounding across time and eternity of challenge
And cultural pearls forming.
The precision of sound
and word has always been a kind of music.
Pearls begin by being trapped into being by growing.
Grit grows into beauty, if the environment supports it
and we know the difference.

Thursday, October 02, 2014

Thursday, September 25, 2014

I do not
mean to be shallowly optimistic or habitually cynical. What I mean to be is
informed, committed, intelligent, compassionate, open-minded, engaged, and
interested in who I am, what I am doing, where we are as a culture, as a world,
as human beings. There is so much happening on large-scale stages in our world
today that demands and needs our attention, our understanding, our
resolving. I understand, now, that we do
not have to know the infinitely changing physical details of each dramatic
situation to understand what path we want to take and what energy we choose to
contribute, just as we do not have to know each chemical within our bodies and
the name of each muscle and nerve that makes us to understand the basis of who
we are and how to support our healthy structure and energy of life. We do have
to want to know, and begin to seek the knowledge that teaches us to know more
about ourselves and what it means to support a good life, which supports a
collective “good life” as we define it. We must be open to expanding our
definitions of life, too, or we will not be able to go with the changes that
offer the opportunities that life reveals to us every day, every moment, from “near”
and “far.” What I contribute to the world is my life as I live it. Love more,
love better, be love and think always of what it means to have the gift of
being alive. We have to know what we want to create before we can become
conscious of our power to create. This
is a beginning of wisdom. Choose wisely ... .Laugh lots. Bake cake, eat cake, toast all good things that come.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

My mind is
prone to wander into mazes that may be playful and fun but not as productive
perhaps as … so many other things and perhaps another look at habits of mind
and remembrance. There isn’t anything so scary there anymore, in that dark
path, where twilight once hovered and slipped into a sometimes beautiful
blanket of dark and moon. Moon-shadows that light the ground like outstretched limbs rest in full length, awaiting full light. Heat returns as sun rises and all nuance of light and dark changes. It is the thrill of a page turning, lunar light over water. Absolutely captivating.

The thrill
of a page-turning is as simply beautiful as a leaf turning, a leaf floating,
borne by any wisp of wind or even silence, to the ground waiting below, where
it will begin to dissolve, slowly, into pieces, fragments, becoming almost
fossil-like if we know how to look. The map and story of that leaf remains, in
memory – ours and the Earth’s and the tree’s – as we honor the simple turning
of seasons.

The delight
of glittering sunlight is like a glimmer of a smile on a face which lights with
love, remembrance, memory of laughter, and the spark of what will come next, an
outstretched hand, a thought as a bridge to new tomorrows, and the absolute joy
of come-what-may, the adventures we create and are.

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

“Instead of
being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement.” What are we trying to advance and why?

David Brooks writes about William Deresiewicz’s vision of what it means to grow up (I’m
paraphrasing – he says “what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood”). What it means to be educated in an
environment that encourages a mind to discover what it is that is “worth
wanting.” He writes about how in Deresiewicz's view elite universities have been absorbed
into the “commercial ethos.” Stephen Pinker, the much read and visible
psychologist, suggests that the university’s job is cognitive. He says “… I
have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul.” Students
should acquire specific, practical knowledge. Brooks articulates what we have
before us, as these thinkers suggest: three distinct purposes for a university:
the commercial purpose (starting a career); cognitive purpose (acquiring
information and learning how to think); and the moral purpose, as Deresiewicz
offers in his new book, Excellent Sheep:
The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Brooks
articulates perfectly, I think, that “people in authority no longer feel
compelled to define how they think moral, emotional and spiritual growth
happens.”Either they don’t think it’s
their place or they don’t think they know.

I had a
college education in the early 80s, after a boarding school education in West
Africa. My first “classroom experiences” began in a converted carport where my
mother taught us, her four children, and other children who dropped in at
different times. She incorporated what was called a correspondence system,
which homeschoolers will recognize. I was born the third of triplets and we had
an older brother, so we had a good beginning for a classroom. We graduated from
high school in Nigeria and returned to the US for college. It took me a long
while to sift and absorb and understand and balance that college experience (as
I’ve written about in my “memoir), but all in all the incubation and
environment was a wonderful one for me to begin to balance all of the energies
of life I’d lived so far and was introducing in this next big new phase of life
adventure that college is and was. There were wonderful professors who were
passionate about their mission to teach young minds as they embraced the big
world of both people and ideas. There was enough of a range of students to
always offer a new horizon to watch, engage, and learn from as one’s mind
opened to all that was offered. I am eternally grateful for that incubation,
especially the professors whose intense mission helped create a great and warm
environment for learning and advancing the life of the mind along with the Life
of the individual and the individual as part of a collective.

I also went
to graduate school and, after a little meandering path, received a Master’s
degree which was satisfying to me at the time. With some struggle, I had accomplished a goal. Five
or six years later, I was introduced to a woman whose career was as an R.N. and
also began teaching what she called Spiritual Philosophy. Though I had been born the child of
missionaries and was deeply incubated in religious teachings and culture, I
discovered I did not have a definition of the soul that was satisfying to me as
a mind. I thought I knew what “the soul” was, yet after listening to teaching
about the soul for a few years and being asked to define the soul, I discovered
that my answer did not really make sense to me – it was simply something I had
heard and been taught at some point, but it did not have any true meaning that
was valuable to me as a mind, to continue expanding and exploring and make this
definition useful in my everyday evolution.

We have this
dual concept in our world about what is “practical” and what is “spiritual,” I
think, which harks back to our ancient
beliefs about the material and the spiritual; the lofty and the low; the body
and the spirit. What Spiritual Philosophy has given me, as I continue to study “the
meaning of life,” is a definition of the soul (as the mind and emotions), what
it means to be designed as an evolving spirit consciousness, and the structure
of what we have given ourselves to follow as physical human beings who are made
to “live a good life” – the Ethical Values which are our spiritual heritage and
embedded as part of our physical design.

Just as with
any system of beliefs, we can pick and choose what we want to learn and we may
also think we already “know it all.” We may think we are open to learning but mightily resist being taught. Children and parents the world over may smile at this enlightening thought, as I do. I have learned that we are “attracted to”
(curious about) what we want and need to learn, even if we are not consciously
aware of why we need to learn it. We are energy and energy must move and change. (We have learned that.) It is
our soul (as our mind and emotions) that, as energy, is attracted to and by energy and attracts
other energy. If we think about “energy”
only as natural gas, oil, or calories burned, we are denying our mind and
emotions (as our soul) the satisfaction of coming to know itself in the thrill
of its adventure of life and growth.

Once we are
motivated to want to learn something new, we have truly begun to expand our
mind. We commit ourselves to learning, to growing as a mind. Our body knows how
to grow itself – as a mind, we have to learn to support our optimum physical
growth. We also have to learn to support our mind and our emotions in their
optimum growth. These realms of knowledge support our spiritual growth, just as
our spiritual growth supports a healthy mind and a healthy body and a happy
life. We don’t have to know how to “build a soul,” as Pinker writes – we do
need to know that we are a soul, of dual mind and emotions, and that we are
designed to expand our consciousness. Acquiring useful knowledge is a main
mission of the soul; but how do we define “useful knowledge”? The intellect is not alone in the Universe of
our internal mass consciousness. The mind and the heart are not designed to act
independently, just as we humans are not designed to live on an island alone,
as our own universe. Until we begin to think about what is our human design, in
more than just physical ways (how can we fix the heart; why do we have high
cholesterol, etc.), we will gather a lot of data, but not necessarily be truly
educated (civilized). We will not have
to spend lots of money to study, again, why drinking more pure water is good
for our overall health, beginning with our cells; why neurotoxins defeat our
design of being healthy and energized as; why being kind and compassionate to
ourselves and each other is a lesson we are all invited to learn to better our
human and planetary health. And so on.